19:46 Mr Mark Spencer (Sherwood) (Con)

At the same time, we need to recognise our nation’s energy security position and how crucial it is for us to find new sources of energy so that we are not dependent on other nations to produce energy for us. We have a great thirst for energy and power, and it is important for us to find new sources of renewable energy. Solar is a good example, but another one that I should like to flag up is anaerobic digestion, which has a great future. My constituents recognise the benefits of anaerobic digestion. Anybody who is offered the choice of an energy recovery plant, an incinerator or an anaerobic digester within their community will always go for an anaerobic digester, because it does not involve a chimney pot. Anaerobic digestion has a great deal to offer the nation, and with that method we can produce energy using biogas—I want the Government to push that.

[Source]

19:56 Martin Caton (Gower) (Lab)

As a member of the Environmental Audit Committee under the committed leadership of my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley), I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this important debate. I shall pick up on some of the issues that she raised and ask how we can help to make the Earth Summit in Brazil in June a meaningful driver of sustainable development. I am also pleased to follow the hon. Member for Sherwood (Mr Spencer), a colleague on the Committee. I am not convinced that I want to look through his shale gas window, but I agree with many of the other points he made.

The environmental protection pillar has probably shown the least progress. The Secretary-General said that pressure on ecosystems continued to increase, as did the loss of forests and biodiversity. Sadly, the world has failed to respond to the dangers that it recognised 20 years ago, which is enormously disappointing, because in that time the scientific evidence on the consequences of failing to tackle climate change has become stronger. We have also learned a lot more about what is happening to ecosystems, biodiversity, the nitrogen cycle and the other processes that the Stockholm Resilience Centre identifies as the planetary boundaries within which humanity can operate safely.

The EAC report on carbon budgets called for the introduction of mandatory emissions reporting by business to help to tackle climate change. Various organisations and bodies have called for Rio+20 to agree a mandatory regime for sustainability reporting, and we agree with them. That sort of transparency will help the private sector to move more quickly to play its part in creating that green economy.

[Source]

20:06 Graham Stuart (Conservative)

The Earth Summit in 1992 was a timely and significant international event that brought together 172 countries, more than 100 of which were represented by their leaders. It led to the creation of the UN conventions on biological diversity, the framework convention on climate change, the principles on sustainable forestry and Local Agenda 21, all of which were designed to tackle the unsustainable use of natural resources and reduce man’s impact on the environment. Twenty years later, however, as leaders are about to meet again in Rio, we have to be honest about where we are. The state of the environment has worsened significantly, with many of the natural resources on which we all depend under ever-increasing strain in many areas, including oceans and forests, biodiversity and rising greenhouse gas emissions. Yes, we can all point to significant advances in parts of the world—for example, the significant decrease in deforestation in Brazil—and to political processes such as the recent outcome of the Durban climate negotiations, but all the scientific indicators are flashing red.

[Source]

20:21 Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley) and all the other speakers of all parties with whom I agree on many issues. Speaking as a Liberal Democrat, as a former member of the Environmental Audit Committee and, indeed, as a former GLOBE delegate to the Cancun climate change summit, I feel as though I am speaking among friends here on many of these issues. I commend the Environmental Audit Committee for its report, for its mission to raise the profile of Rio+20 and for its role in securing this debate today.

Twenty years ago, I was involved in raising the profile of the original Earth summit. I then worked for Oxfam, and we were sending out tens of thousands of mailings to Oxfam supporters, trying to get them to lobby their MPs. I remember that a young campaigner called Caroline Lucas was working there at the same time. Whatever happened to her, Mr Deputy Speaker? Even then, we were trying to link the issues of global poverty, global justice and global sustainability, and trying to persuade people that they were absolutely inseparable. In the intervening 20 years, it has become even clearer that that is the case. The risk of climate change, and the risk that it poses to the global economy, as well as to people’s lives and livelihoods, is now even better understood. The risk of climate change accelerating beyond 2 above pre-industrial levels is also much clearer, not only from the United Nations framework convention on climate change reports but from domestic reports such as the Stern report, which catalogued in excruciating detail the risks of flooding, famine and disruption, and the challenge that they would pose to global economics as well as to people’s lives.

Even then, we predicted that the first people to suffer the most from climate change and environmental disaster would be the poor. Sadly, that has proved to be the case. With hindsight, it was probably true even then, as environments in the horn of Africa and the Sahel were beginning to change on a permanent basis. The risks to the poor in countries such as Bangladesh are even clearer now. This is also true in the UK, and even more so now. In 2007, my constituency was extremely badly flooded, and it was the uninsured and the underinsured—those on low incomes—who often suffered the most. We know that that kind of extreme weather event, even in relatively wealthy countries such as ours, will be much more frequent thanks to climate change. It is even clearer that we cannot separate climate change and environmental sustainability from issues of poverty and social justice. Only by taking concerted action across rich and poor nations, forested and deforested nations, and those nations that are the most and least vulnerable to climate change, can we tackle this global challenge. We are, as someone said a few years ago, all in this together.

Several hon. Members have said that monitoring and verification are a crucial part of the process, and we have seen significant progress in that regard. There is a significant prospect of reconciliation between China and the United States on those issues, which offers the prospect of whatever follows the Kyoto protocol being a more robust and verifiable process. We have also seen the setting of high-level millennium development goals, and the acceptance by many nations that those goals can provide a driver for international and domestic action, even though we know that many of them might be missed.

In this country, the use of domestic legislation has been important, as the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness said. The Climate Change Act 2008 set the 80% target, and this Government have produced the natural environment White Paper, which is a truly radical document. If the policy of valuing natural capital that it advocates were put into practice and were to make a difference to the detail of Government policy, we would be taking a massive step forward. We have also heard the promise to establish the world’s first green investment bank, and seen the prospect of the green deal making a radical difference to energy efficiency.

In opposition the Liberal Democrats produced a document called “Our Natural Heritage”. It highlighted the risk of things such as nickel, tin, tungsten, zinc, bauxite and oil becoming rarer in some cases and perhaps even running out in the next 50 years; or, if they did not run out, becoming much more expensive and more environmentally damaging to extract. The economic risks as well as the environmental risks were pinpointed, and we suggested introducing an anti-waste and resource efficiency Act to parallel the Climate Change Act 2008, to monitor and set objectives for sustainable resource use and reduce the associated risks. I still commend our publication to Ministers. One policy we got through from this document was the local green space designation to protect green spaces important to local communities. I can see why that was a politically attractive one to pick out, but I think our proposed resource efficiency Act would have been even more important. If the Rio high-level goals helped to contribute to promoting governmental goals on resource use and worldwide goals, that would be significant.

[Source]

20:31 Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)

Rio+20 is likely to proceed on a much more sombre basis than earlier summits of this kind, but as other Members have pointed out, last year’s Durban summit on climate change demonstrated that expectations can sometimes be confounded, and I hope that we can approach this summit in that spirit. The fact that it has been demanded by the developing world rather than by developed nations makes a significant difference. It will look to the themes of Rio, but it will do so in terms of everyone’s development. It will consider the concept of a green economy in the context of sustainable development and the institutional framework that will make it possible, and I believe that it will do so in the light of the whole Brundtland report rather than just the oft-quoted first line. It must concern itself with the carrying capacity of the planet and with its concomitant—the need for global equity in the sharing of the resources that go into sustainable development.

It might be salutary to compare that starting line with what we thought obtained at Rio 20 years ago. The work of the Stockholm resilience centre at Stockholm university was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Martin Caton), and was examined in some detail in the Select Committee’s report. The centre asked what the planet could put up with in a number of areas before its sustainability threshold was breached. What were the planet’s sustainability boundaries? It considered 10 of them: climate change, ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion, the nitrogen cycle, the phosphorus cycle, global freshwater use, land system change, the rate of biodiversity loss, atmospheric aerosol loading, and chemical pollution. That work made it clear that we have not only transgressed three of those boundaries—the rate of biodiversity loss, the nitrogen cycle and, of course, climate change—but have often done so in a startlingly profligate way, and are close to doing so in three other areas: ocean acidification, the phosphorus cycle, and land system change.

[Source]

20:42 George Eustice (Camborne and Redruth) (Con)

The green campaign groups have been so incredibly successful at highlighting the problem of climate change that there has almost been an unintended consequence that has been unhelpful to the cause: the creation of a sense of resignation among people that there is nothing that they can do, there is huge impending doom and no person on their own can make a difference. That is a dangerous thing to encourage.

The over-emphasis on climate change in the environmental debate has been in danger of eclipsing other equally important issues, such as biodiversity. I have encountered green campaigners who say, “Yes, but tackling climate change is the key to improving biodiversity. If we solve climate change, we solve a lot of other things.” That is true up to a point, because climate change is a factor in undermining biodiversity, but we must recognise that a range of other issues, such as sustainable farming and deforestation, get neglected and overlooked.

The danger of focusing too much on climate change in this debate is that it will not energise the public in a way that other things can. Fundraisers at bodies such as the WWF do not put complicated issues to do with carbon footprints on the front covers of their magazines; they use pictures of baby tigers under threat of extinction, and there is a reason for that. People care about our environment and about issues such as species extinction and biodiversity, so we are missing a trick by not broadening the debate out to engage people more.

[Source]

20:49 Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)

“there has been inadequate progress on sustainable development since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit.”

The source to which I want to refer is a film, “The Age of Stupid”. I do not know whether many hon. Members will have seen it, but it features Pete Postlethwaite as the sole survivor of a climate catastrophe. It is based in 2050 and he is looking back to today. He looks through all the newsreels—real, genuine newsreels with all the evidence that we have around us that climate change is happening—and he says, in words that still make the hairs on the back of my neck go up in a shiver, “Why is it, knowing what we knew then, we didn’t act when there was still time?” To me, that is just about the most important question that we could ask. Given that we have all this evidence that we must act, what is stopping us?

Part of it is to do with the fact that for too long, a shift to a green economy has been portrayed as though we were talking about shivering around a candle in a cave. It has been portrayed too often as being about hair shirts and we have assumed that if we scare the life out of people sufficiently with the terrible stories of what will happen—and it will happen if we do not get off the collision course with climate change—that, on its own, will be enough to motivate people to change their behaviour. Yet, as we have seen, the evidence shows that that is not what will motivate behaviour change.

We have started to make some policies based on recognising the need for constraint, starting with the Climate Change Act 2008. I believe, and the science suggests, that we in the developed countries need to be reducing our emissions by something like 90% by 2030, so I do not agree with the targets in that Act, but the architecture in it is incredibly important. The Government could do much worse than to mark the 20th anniversary of the Rio summit by amending the Act, first, to set targets that are in line with the science and, secondly, to include traded or embedded carbon. For too long it has been too easy to outsource our responsibility for much of the carbon that is produced in order to make the products that we consume. The fact that the production happily happens over in China, with the impact going on to its balance sheet rather than on to ours, seems grossly unfair to me. If we are importing products from other countries, the carbon that is embedded in those products should be part of our calculations and audits.

Other hon. Members have talked about our current fixation with economic growth, which means that we over-emphasise the measure of that growth—gross domestic product—to the detriment of other measures of success. Really, our policy on growth is no more or less than a policy to increase GDP by a certain percentage each year, but as others have said, GDP measures do not differentiate the social value of different forms of economic activity or revenue and capital. A Government who use up their capital—the country’s natural resources—and treat it as national income, can boast of having delivered growth and increased GDP. We have seen that on a vast scale with the billions of pounds-worth of oil and gas from the North sea that has been treated as revenue with no thought to the fact that that income is a one-off boost to the economy. For 30 years it has made the UK economy look much healthier than it actually has been, and instead of the proceeds being invested wisely in the future—for example, on renewable energy facilities that we can use when the oil and gas run out—it has been used to fund consumer booms that have led to the inevitable busts.

Businesses need to be hugely involved in the project, and in some respects are far more advanced in their thinking on this agenda than Ministers. We could learn from some of the businesses that are already beginning to think about what it would mean for them to live in a steady state economy, rather than one that was based on more and more production and consumption. As others have said, it is incredibly important that we send a very clear message about the importance of the Rio Earth summit, and we would do that by ensuring that our own Secretary of State is there, but I join other hon. Members who have said strongly that the Prime Minister also needs to be there to send a strong message that this matters, that this is urgent. The time that we have in this Parliament—the next three or four years—will be critical as to whether we invest properly in getting off the collision course that we are on with the climate crisis. It falls on our generation to do that. It is a huge responsibility, but it is also an awesome opportunity.

[Source]

21:00 Peter Aldous (Waveney) (Con)

The LEP has been asked by the Government to take a UK lead in demonstrating how business can take advantage of the new markets for environmental goods and services, and to support the strong stance that the UK has taken nationally to reduce carbon and tackle climate change. The Government have given the LEP green economy pathfinder status and it is currently working up with business leaders and academics proposals that demonstrate how the green economy is vital to the UK economic recovery and to sustainable growth. In April the LEP will present to Government its manifesto, which will bring together a wide range of best practice studies, as well as some innovative thinking on how to put low carbon at the heart of business opportunity and success.

Since May 2010 the Government have done much to promote the green economy. First, they have supported research and development through the proposed technology and innovation centre for renewable energy and the proposed five renewable obligation certificates that support and encourage wave and tidal technology.

The Rio summit presents the UK with an opportunity to showcase what we have been doing to promote the green economy. I am not suggesting that the Secretary of State should fly down to Rio, hopefully with the Prime Minister on the wing, to boast and to swank about the Government’s achievements. However, in a measured and constructive way she, with the Prime Minister by her side, can promote the green economy and show how a framework for sustainable development can be laid down. I also ask that she supports the UN Secretary-General’s “Sustainable Energy for All by 2030” initiative, which will be launched at the conference.

My hon. Friend is using the terms “green economy” and “renewables” as though they were the same as decarbonisation. As the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) explained, we have to cut our carbon emissions by 80%, or even 90%, by 2050. Currently, about 2.5% of our energy comes from renewables. Does my hon. Friend accept that other forms of low-carbon energy have a major part to play, because he has not mentioned them so far in his remarks? I of course mean nuclear and carbon capture and storage.

[Source]

21:09 Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op)

Members have already said that although there has been progress things have, in many ways, gone backwards very badly over the past 20 years. The examples of climate change, deforestation, water shortages, melting ice caps and biodiversity have been mentioned, and in most respects things have become a lot worse, rather than better, over the past 20 years, so it is worth understanding where we are if we are going to think about how we move forward.

Rio can, for example, address the food and agriculture issues to which Members have referred, and encourage the exchange of technologies and ideas on the green economy worldwide, an issue on which we in the UK have an opportunity to set an agenda from which other countries can benefit. We can try to ensure that the climate finance funds that were promised at Copenhagen, at Cancun and then at Durban are delivered, and we can look for progress on deforestation. Some progress has been made, but in many areas matters are going backwards not forwards, and we certainly need to push action on deforestation much higher up the international agenda.

We should not, however, delude ourselves into thinking that such changes and progress are going to be enough. Pathways, road maps and signposts are all important, but at the end of the day we need to secure the type of internationally binding agreements that were sought at Copenhagen on climate change, on tackling deforestation, on food, on agriculture and on land use.

[Source]

21:15 Mr David Burrowes (Enfield, Southgate) (Con)

I apologise for missing some of this excellent debate, but it was for a good reason. I was meeting representatives of Christian Aid, who are very interested in the debate having been much engaged in this issue; indeed, a briefing was sent to hon. Members. They reminded me that this week the high-level UN Commission on Sustainable Development published a report that set the parameters for April’s G20 meeting of Ministers on sustainable energy. That is a very important meeting that will set the ground for the Rio summit. I invite the Minister to respond positively in seeing Rio as a practical way of following up the meeting to ensure that there is genuine progress.

To put it in a straightforward way, we need to improve the situation for the poorest communities across the globe. We must banish the need for young people to go miles and miles to forage for firewood in forests. We must ensure that there is sustainable energy so that young people do not need to do that, but can instead go into education and help to meet the millennium development goals.

[Source]

21:22 Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)

I will not dwell on climate change, other than to say that even if it is not happening, those other trends are real. They are mathematical observations, and there is no doubting them. If even the most conservative predictions about climate change are accurate, those problems will be massively compounded. One has to wonder what is the purpose of an economy that is so utterly divorced from basic reality that it is still growing even as it is eroding the very basis of life. We know that change is going to happen. The current trends clearly cannot continue for ever—primary level mathematics tells us that they have to end at some point, and it is unlikely to be a happy ending. Change is going to happen either through our choice or because it is forced upon us.

[Source]

21:32 Fiona O'Donnell (East Lothian) (Lab)

I welcome the Committee’s report on the preparations for the Rio+20 summit in June, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response to the report and the many questions raised by Members on both sides in their informed and passionate contributions. The tone of the debate has been very positive, although many Members have spoken about the dire challenges that we face. I congratulate the Government Whips for keeping their climate change deniers off their Benches.

Rio+20 is the biggest global gathering on sustainable development since the original summit in 1992. It is crucial that it delivers outcomes and sets down some serious policy milestones for 2015 and beyond. The previous Labour Government were the first on the planet to enshrine climate change targets in law. Given the UK’s global leadership on environmental issues, we want to work with the Secretary of State and the Government on a cross-party basis to give that same leadership at Rio+20.

Carbon reporting is a vital connection in driving up standards in green jobs and growth, yet when it comes to carbon reporting at home, the Government are dragging their feet. Will the Minister guarantee that his Government keep their promise and make it mandatory for UK companies to report their carbon emissions before Rio? The deadline in the Climate Change Act 2008 is April 2012. Will the Department meet that deadline—yes or no?

I want to try to strike a positive note, so let me move on to what Labour sees as the key priorities and opportunities at Rio. Our leadership at home is key to our credibility on the global stage, and if Government Members do not get that, we have a problem. When it comes to food poverty at home, we see rising food prices and families forced to rely on charities and food banks. Last year the Trussell Trust, one of the largest food charities, opened a food bank every week. The amazing charity FareShare, which I visited yesterday, works with other charities to feed 35,000 people a day in the UK. Rio rightly places food security and ensuring a sustainable, healthy and safe food supply for the world’s population at the top of its agenda. The hon. Members for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) and for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) both have a history with Oxfam. As Oxfam has highlighted in its Grow campaign, we need to tackle the structural causes of food crises, addressing the effects of speculation on food prices, the impact of biofuels and land grabs. The answer is not producing more food alone, but producing more food with less impact. We need to mitigate the impact of climate change and invest in agricultural practices and sustainable livelihoods in developing countries.

As the hon. Members for Cheltenham and for Richmond Park both said, resource scarcity is the biggest challenge facing the planet. With the population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050, Rio is an opportunity to reach a global agreement on how we can ensure access to water, food and energy for all, alongside the long-term challenges of climate change and eco-system management. The interconnected nature of resource scarcity means that political leadership is vital. On this side of the House, we are taking a joined-up approach, working across shadow Departments to reflect the broad range of issues that will be discussed in June. Will the Minister tell us when he last met with his colleagues in the Department of Energy and Climate Change and the Department for International Development, and what discussions they had about their priorities for Rio?

[Source]

21:45 The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Richard Benyon)

Our understanding of the need to green our economy and promote sustainable development has improved dramatically over the past 20 years. It is no longer something that we should do, but something that we need to do for future prosperity. It has been pointed out tonight that more than 1 billion people are living in poverty, that two thirds of the world’s ecosystems are in decline and that climate change will cost up to a quarter of global gross domestic product.

A key part of Rio will be an agreement on the sustainable development goals—a priority for the UK, on which we are working closely with our EU and international partners. There is a lot to do on fleshing out SDGs, but we want to lead the way in helping to develop this thinking. The Secretary of State met a group of Ministers in Nairobi last week and the Colombian Environment Minister here today. We need a renewed focus on tackling the major sustainability issues of access to food, sustainable energy and water.

We need a clear course of action on food security and sustainable agriculture, which is climate smart, reduces waste and takes into account water resources. We need to be clear that access to clean and safe water is a prerequisite for green growth. Just last week, we were discussing drought here in the UK—a country famous for its rainfall. In China, which has 20% of the world’s population but only 6% of its water resources, half of which are undrinkable, access to water resources will only become more important. The UN Secretary-General's “Sustainable Energy for All” initiative is an important step towards increasing sustainable energy, energy efficiency and the use of renewables.

[Source]